Introduction
We’re all united in thinking Nick Haywood is pretty offensive…
Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave up in the Scottish Highlands or been seeking enlightenment on top of a mountain in Tibet, you can’t have failed to have heard of Call of Duty. While everyone was going ‘oooh’, ‘aaah’ and ‘AARRGH!’ over Medal of Honour: Allied Assault, Infinity Ward and Activision were quietly putting together what is arguably one of the WW2 based masterpieces of the FPS genre. Call of Duty took a look at MOH:AA, and then took it’s own path, giving us some of the best FPS moments to date.
What made CoD stand out from the crowd was its unabashed ‘borrowing’ of ideas from history and the movies. Infinity Ward had based many levels on famous films or real life actions from WW2, which gave the player a real yearning to see what was next. MOH:AA had done the ‘Saving Private Ryan’ Normandy landings so well, CoD didn’t even bother, choosing instead to take other actions from the war and focus on them. You had the lot here, Easy Company’s assault on the gun positions at Brecourt Manor, the heroic capture and defence of Pegasus Bridge, the battle for Stalingrad… the only thing missing, in my opinion, was leaping over barbed wire on a motor bike a’la Steve McQueen in ‘The Great Escape’.
So now it’s time for an Expansion Pack, to hopefully give us more of the same and perhaps even add something new to the mix. The task for this has been handed to Gray Matter Studios, whose history includes Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and, under a previous name, Kingpin and Quake2:The Reckoning. So, they know a thing or two about FPS’s, let’s see if they managed to add something to CoD.